The myth that the Dutch had a 'good' war

Toby Clements reviews Ajax, the Dutch, the War by Simon Kuper

Matches between Feyenoord of Rotterdam and Ajax of Amsterdam are the crown jewels of the Dutch football season, the equivalent of Arsenal playing Manchester United. But through an accident of history, Ajax are thought of as a Jewish team, and every time the two sides play, Feyenoord supporters hiss through their teeth in a ghastly impression of a tap in a gas chamber and shout at the opposition fans: "next stop: Auschwitz!" It is shocking that this should be tolerated anywhere, but especially so that it passes almost unremarked upon in liberal, tolerant Holland.

In Ajax, the Dutch, the War, Simon Kuper shows that our fond image of Holland is inaccurate. Using the history of Ajax football club in particular and football on the continent in general, Kuper argues that the Feyenoord supporters' attitude is more symptomatic of Dutch society than any hash café, field of tulips or blue-lit prostitute in her shop window.

His concern is the notion that the Dutch had a "good" war. In Holland, this myth has been dispelled, but elsewhere it persists. (Queen Beatrix tried to apologise for the Dutch failings on a visit to Israel. Ah! Those Dutch, the Israelis replied, so modest.) The myth is based on Anne Frank and a dock strike held in Rotterdam in 1941 to protest at the German treatment of the Jews. But Holland had the second largest Nazi movement in Europe outside Germany, and in no other country except Poland was so high a percentage of Jews deported. Without Dutch help, the Germans would not have been able to arrest 10 per cent of the Jews they did. The dock strike ended after two days with no violence at all and Anne Frank was betrayed. (She was arrested by a German and three Dutch policemen, one of whom was still working for the police until 1980.) Kuper compares this to the Jewish experience in Denmark, Bulgaria and Italy, where even after the Germans occupied the country in 1943 the Jews fared better than in Holland.

Kuper has stretched his ambit to include something about football in England and Germany - particularly the "friendly" played in Berlin in 1938, when the English team were photographed giving the Nazi salute. He enjoys the fact that the Germans, so mighty everywhere else, were often humbled on the football pitch by relative minnows, such as Switzerland. He explains that their tenacious style of play came from the Hitlerian ideal of Kampf, or struggle. This compares nicely to another theory I came across recently, one that proposed their patient style of play evolved because their verbs so often come at the end of their sentences.

This is a sometimes bitter book, and its truths are often unpalatable. Kuper will not have made himself many friends in his adopted country (his father emigrated to Holland in 1976) and in a sense it has been ambushed by history, since Pym Fortuyn's anti-immigration party lost so many seats in January's elections. But it is a fascinating history, full of startling facts and sobering detail.